Philip Glass

Philip Glass, L.A. Weekly, November 21, 1986

Minimalism doesn't seem to be the quite the hot issue it once was.

Thankfully. It never really was an issue for me. By '75, when I was working on Einstein on the Beach, I wasn't interested in "minimalism" anymore. But it takes a while for these kinds of tags to die away. That was a term you'd seen in newspapers, but I don't think any composers ever called themselves minimalists.

But you still are labeled as such.

Yes, but now there are all kinds of other labels that are even worse, so I'm beginning to think "minimalism" wasn't really so bad. [Laughs.] How'd you like to be called a "New Age" artist?

What do you think of that music?

I only know what I hear on the radio, but it sounds like what we used to call "mood music." I worked in my father's record store in Baltimore, and we sold lots and lots of Mantovani and all that -- you know there's usually a lady in a red dress sitting by a fireplace, and it says Music to Read By, Music to Eat By. I mean, you're not actually supposed to listen to it. I think my music is a little more assertive than that.

But, you know, I'll put on Berlioz and do the dishes, and that's kind of insulting, isn't it? [Laughs.] Though that's a situation in which I really can listen. But I was working with an editor recently -- I've just finished a book on my first three operas -- and he had some music on. I said, "Can we turn the music off?" He hadn't even noticed it. I could not work with the music on. I also can't eat with music on. I find either I'm not eating or I'm not listening. Washing dishes I can do. And I think I could mow the lawn wearing a Walkman, maybe. But I'd have to be engaged in an extremely simple mechanical activity.

Your relation to recording seems atypical for a serious composer.

I think the best way to express it is that we -- myself, Kurt Munkacsi, who works as the record producer, and Michael Reisman, the musical director -- use the technology to do what it was built to do. It's true that most composers who were recording an opera would just hang up a mike and "let it rip," and then do different takes and try to match tempos and try to match dynamics -- which to us seems like a nightmare. We don't see how you can do it. But I've been working with technologically oriented people, and the only way to make the kind of records we want to make is to record each track separately. Then if, say, a bassoon part needs to be electronically doubled, we can do it. I have no compunction about that. You know, as recently as 1982, when Glenn Gould died, some bonehead actually wrote, "He couldn't make records without cheating."

It's looking at music as a kind of sport.

Yes, taking the performance as the event instead of the music, as if it were the accomplishment of the task of playing that was being recorded, rather than the music itself.

In fact, we mix our records for how we think they should sound in your living room. I heard some new record the other day that had supposedly been mixed to give you the impression you were sitting in a concert hall. And it was true. They had acoustically placed you in, like, the 15th row. And I thought, "My God! This is insane!" Why would you want to create the illusion that you were somewhere you weren't? It seems like a completely false issue.

But you're also atypical in the sense that the records themselves function as part of your work, as with a pop group.

That's right. In 1971, when I started my own record company, it was because I'd discovered that radio stations wouldn't play my music if it was on tape, but they would if it was on a record. They wanted that 12-inch round format -- the thing with the hole in it, playing at 33 rpm. It was a practical matter of survival. And recording helped to create work for the ensemble. We could go to a city where we'd never played before, and people would know the music.

What's the difference between a pop song and an art song, and is that difference significant to you?

Well, songs exist everywhere in music. "Songs," to me, can mean anything from Berlioz to Ives to Janis Joplin to the Talking Heads. Now, with Songs from Liquid Days, I admit that I've confused the issue by using people who work mainly in a more commercial vein than I do. But let me go back a little bit to how the record came about.

I was about to start on an opera project with the writer Doris Lessing, based on her novel The Making of the Representative from Planet 8, and it was going to be my first opera in English. I'd used Sanskrit and Akkadian, and Einstein uses mostly numbers and solfeggio. So I'd never really addressed myself to the problem of English as an operatic language, which, of course, is enormous, as you know if you've ever gone to hear an opera sung in English. Even if it's Benjamin Britten, you can understand maybe half of it. And as I was going to be working with one of the important living writers, it seemed that I had to make a real effort to make the language intelligible. Songs from Liquid Days was my warm-up piece for that. And it seemed to me that the people who would be able to help the most in this enterprise, who knew the most about setting music to English -- more than poets, or even than most opera composers -- were songwriters. So I talked to David Byrne, to Paul Simon, to Laurie Anderson, to Suzanne Vega, and they were all enormously helpful. The question of would these be pop songs or art songs never came up, because I was thinking about purely musical things. I'm thinking about how English works when you sing it. How high can the voice go before the words lose their meaning? And how long can you keep the voice low, in a conversational range, and keep the song interesting? What kind of songs they were was the last thing on my mind. Of course, once the record is done and handed to the record company, you're forced to deal with that reality: "What kind of songs are they?" And who the hell knows? [Laughs.]

In trying to resolve some of these technical questions, did you study any pop records?

Well, I've listened to pop all my life. I've been lucky that way. From the age of 12, I worked in my father's record store, and there's very little music after 1949 that I did not hear. I remember the first day we opened a box of Elvis Presley records, and they practically disappeared from under my hands. People were grabbing across the counter for them. That whole revolution in music, I was part of it in that way. And I've got a 15-year-old son and an 18-year-old daughter, and they keep me current. Though what's happening as well with that generation is that they look on our pop culture as a kind of historical item. I couldn't believe it! Last summer, what do I hear coming out of the blaster? Van Morrison! Astral Weeks! And before that, about three or four years ago, they discovered the Door. The other day I was in the kitchen, I heard this music coming from upstairs and said, "Julia, what are you listening to?" "Pink Floyd!" It's like Remembrance of Things Past, coming through my children.

Some composers might imagine that such openness to pop would somehow affect their credibility.

I've had that impression, also. [Laughs.] I'm not really concerned about that. That really comes out of the fact that for the first ten years I was with my ensemble, no one cared what I did anyway. I had the reputation for being a madman and a primitive and all kinds of bad things. I had no reputation to protect. You know, I just read in Time magazine how mainstream I've become. But I wish someone would tell the people at the San Francisco Opera and the Los Angeles Opera that I'm now a mainstream composer, so I could get my operas in those houses. In fact, in the "established" world of experimental music, or classical concert music, or traditional repertory opera, I'm still considered pretty wacky.

But you do have a public now, and having one, do you ever find yourself tempted to play to its expectations?

Well, of course, to have a real relationship with an audience makes things immediately more complex. I mean, it's like having a real girlfriend, instead of an imaginary one.

The way I've been able to resolve this is to always write for an ideal public. Because, you know, to write for an audience doesn't mean you have to write down to them. In fact, I think the greatest mistake an artist can make is to underestimate his audience and to overestimate himself.

Over time, you've developed for yourself a well-defined, recognizable musical vocabulary. Do you ever have the urge to abandon it?

The ironic thing is that I'm always trying to abandon it. I think, any artist will tell you that he's always trying to completely change his style. I seem incapable of it. And when I make what I consider a great stylistic change, it turns out to be the tiniest little thing. I'll say, "But didn't you notice I did this this time?" And I have to explain it to people. You know, the first problem an artist has is to find his own voice, and the second problem he has is to get rid of it. Of course, it's important to solve that first problem. But once you have, the immediate second though is that it's become a terrible burden. The other problem is that a body of work builds up a certain inertia; there's this tremendous weight of work that seems to be traveling along behind you at the same pace, and to get it to change course is like trying to get an elephant to move down another path. You can kick and shout and tug at its ear, and you can get it to move a little bit. But to get it turn 90 degrees is very, very hard. We can imagine we're doing it, but it's indeed very hard to do.

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